Nearly two years after its initially-scheduled showing was cut short, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden is again hosting an artistic exhibition dedicated to the medicinal properties of plants.
Plant Cure, a wide-ranging showcase of mother nature’s healing powers, as interpreted through five artists-in-residence, arrived at the Botanic Garden’s Conservatory Gallery in March 2020. But the onset of the pandemic that month forced it to go dark, and despite the reopening of the city’s cultural institutions over the ensuing months, including the Botanic Garden, the Conservatory Gallery was only reopened last October.
The exhibit, which includes drawings, paintings, sculptures, and written word among other things, stood in place in the interim, unable to please the eyes of Garden visitors. But all that time off gave the artists time to reflect, contemplate, and do research in the garden and in its library.
“To be at the gardens for six months? We had total access to the library and also the grounds,” said Maddy Rosenberg, founder of Central Booking, the exhibit’s curator. “So it was an amazing experience.”
Now, the exhibit is back on and will be on display at the Conservatory until the end of March.
“I think it drives home even more now,” Rosenberg said. “The interaction between the ecosystems and how we rely on everything, and the need for medicine, psychologically and chemically that we rely on. It couldn’t have been better timing in that sense and subject matter, though of course, it wasn’t the best timing in people being able to see the exhibition.”
Rosenberg, who grew up exploring the Botanic Garden, originally wanted to bring the project on the road, with each exhibition containing a mix of work from local artists and work from artists at previous stops. The pandemic put a damper on those plans, but now, she hopes to eventually bring it to Los Angeles.